The Soft Machine Page 2

  Burroughs’ position was self-contradictory, however. On the one hand, he promoted cut-up methods as a radical cut in literary history, the literally cutting edge of a new revolutionary movement, most visibly in his two collaborative 1960 manifesto pamphlets, Minutes to Go (with Gysin, Sinclair Beiles and Gregory Corso) and The Exterminator (with Gysin). On the other hand, he also wanted to present his work in terms of a continuous narrative, in which Naked Lunch was a prequel and The Soft Machine a sequel.

  Writing in July 1960 to Irving Rosenthal, as he prepared the American edition of Naked Lunch, Burroughs stated that “little of the old material” would be used for his new book because it was now “understanding out of date.”7 While he used much more than just a “little,” almost all the material he did use went only into The Soft Machine, and Burroughs brought Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded into the orbit of Naked Lunch despite the fact that—­contrary to the “Word Hoard” myth—their manuscript connections are actually negligible. If Burroughs was being strategic in connecting his books, this applied not only for publishers or interviewers but also in private. In a late 1966 letter he made probably his most emphatic statement on the trilogy and the “Word Hoard”: “You might say that Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, Nova Express, The Ticket That Exploded all derive from one store of material a good part of which was written between 1957 and 1959” (ROW, 243). You might say is an equivocation in itself, a telltale sign of what he should not have said, and Burroughs was saying it in order to defend his third edition of The Soft Machine against the hostile criticisms of Brion Gysin (to which we’ll return). Burroughs overstated the manuscript origins of the trilogy as a way to justify his new version to Gysin—“The assemblage of a book from this material is always hurried and ­arbitrary”—but he was also echoing the story of the book from the beginning, six years earlier.

  “OUT OF A HAT”

  By early December 1959, Burroughs had come up with a new title, “But Is All Back Seat Dreaming.” Initially used for one section sent to Big Table magazine, the title was soon applied to the book as a whole—which, he now told Ginsberg, he had “written most of,” “remaining only the task of correlating material” (ROW, 10). This was premature, and almost a year later he was again telling Ginsberg of his “next novel which is only a problem of putting it together,” even as he admitted it was an “inordinate amount of work” (59). In April 1960 Burroughs had moved from Paris to London and changed the title again, informing Gysin that he had “been writing a sequel to Naked Lunch to be called ‘Mr Bradly Mr Martin’” (25). In the first edition, “all back seat of dreaming” and “mr. bradly mr. martin” would be the titles of the final two sections. Meanwhile, Maurice Girodias began pressing him for a contract on the new book and in early August 1960 Burroughs quipped to Gysin, “Does he know what exactly he is trying to buy?” (42). It was a good question, bearing in mind the feedback Burroughs received on his work in progress later that month from Paul Carroll, who had published “Back Seat” in Big Table.

  Speaking “frankly,” Carroll tried to balance faith in Burroughs with deep scepticism about this “new, difficult work” which had “moved so far from NAKED LUNCH.”8 Burroughs’ reply is instructive. On the one hand, he promised to send “something else as near as possible” along “straight narrative lines,” and on the other he tried to reassure Carroll that the new material would be “readily understandable” once he saw the larger structure of which it was a part.9 Only four months earlier, when returning the corrected proofs of “Back Seat,” Burroughs had shown he already recognized that his cut-up texts needed framing for the reader, sending Carroll a “note on the method used, to be printed with the material” (ROW, 22). In other words, so far as Burroughs was concerned, he was taking measures to ensure the readability of what, in January 1961, he at last named The Soft Machine.

  The “note on method” that Burroughs had sent to accompany “Back Seat” in April 1960 was a short, early version of a much-circulated and often-quoted text, an expanded version of which appeared in The Third Mind: “The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin.” When it was first published under this title later that year in Sidewalk magazine, Burroughs described it as an “explanation” that was “inseparable” from the Soft Machine material published alongside it (entitled “Have You Seen Slotless City?”)10 The note began by tracing the method’s origins in avant-garde history: “Tzara at a Dada Meeting in the 1920s proposed to create a poem on the spot by pulling words out of a hat” (ROW, 22). Burroughs used the resonant final phrasing again when telling Paul Bowles in January 1961 of his “sequel to Naked Lunch entitled The Soft Machine. Cutting and permutating the book writes itself out of a hat” (65). By this time he had been working solidly for eighteen months and was still struggling to cut his manuscripts into shape—“I have so much material here it appalls me to see it” (57), he had despaired in late 1960—so his talk of pulling a book out of a hat was, like Tzara’s original act, a stunt rather than a description of creative process. It wasn’t only his enemies who would throw Burroughs’ words back at him (as hostile and uncomprehending reviewers did, deriding his work as a lazy gimmick): Kerouac dismissed cut-up methods as “an old Dada trick” and Gregory Corso, in a post-script to his own contribution in Minutes to Go, rejected cut-ups as, precisely, old hat: “Tzara did it all before.”11

  Burroughs was guilty of promoting cut-ups too ­simplistically—the message of his early polemics was always: “Method is simple”—but this was precisely because of his evangelical zeal to promote them as widely as possible. It wasn’t a Dada prank, and while The Soft Machine shares more than a similar title with modernist experiments like Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, Stein didn’t believe her creative techniques were also revolutionary tools for her readers to use. In absolute contrast, Burroughs’ “note on method” ended by declaring: “The old word lines keep thee in old world slots. Cut the word lines.” Burroughs therefore tried to distinguish his new work from high modernists and the historical avant-garde both aesthetically—“important to avoid old surreal look,” he wrote to Paul Carroll in January 1961 regarding the use of typeface12—and, above all, politically. It was in this context that he coined the term “soft machine” in late summer 1960.

  “THE FOLLOWING PAGES ARE BATTLE

  INSTRUCTIONS”

  In his 1960 version of “The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin,” Burroughs played the role of guide to his own work by mapping it in four ways: one context was art-historical (referring again to “Tristan Tzara at a Surrealist Rally in the 1920s”), another was that of contemporary science (naming the mathematician John von Neumann, whose “Theory of Games and Economic Behavior introduced the cut up principle of random action into military and game strategy”), and a third was entirely open-ended (“Applications are literally unlimited”). The final context was a sharp negative: “The method was grounded on The Freudian Couch.” For Burroughs, opposition to cut-up methods was inseparable from their creative potential and subversive political importance, and identifying enemies was as necessary as trying to convince sceptics or recruit allies in what he saw as not a literary endeavour at all, but essentially a war. And when he picked up the Stanley knife from Gysin in October 1959, he stabbed it first into Sigmund Freud.

  In part, the attack on Freud reflected Gysin’s own agenda, his dispute with what he referred to in Minutes to Go as “the Art Wing of the Freudian Conspiracy calling itself Surrealism,” and in part it was personal.13 Burroughs had had two decades’ experience of psychoanalysts, but when Gysin introduced him simultaneously to cut-ups and Scientology he immediately made a connection between them as mechanistic methods that promised fast and radical results, ways to cut himself out of the past and to cut the past out of him. The fingerprints of L. Ron Hubbard, pulp science fiction writer as well as cult prophet, are all over the Cut-Up project: from its manifesto Minutes to Go, where he is quoted and effectively named as a fifth collaborator, to the Nova
conspiracy scenario and the therapeutic techniques using tape recorders advocated in the trilogy, although only odd references (e.g., “words engraved on my back tape”) appear in The Soft Machine.

  As quickly as Burroughs decided that the cure was as simple as cutting up words on tape or on paper, he identified the plot against it. In writings from late 1959 onwards, he blasted psychoanalysis as “one of the vilest conspiracies of all time,” aimed at spreading mental illness, serving power elites, and actively blocking cut-up methods.14 In the screaming block capitals typical of 1960 typescripts, he declared that “THE PRACTI­TIONERS OF PSYCHOTHERAPY ARE SHAMELESS OR STUPID MACHINE SENT LIARS AND FRAUDS”: “BURN THEIR STUPID BOOKS. CUT HERR DOCTOR FRAUD INTO A MILLION PIECES. SEE IT FOR THE COMMUNIST SENT LIE IT IS […] THE SOFT MACHINE IS YOUR ILLNESS CUT THE MACHINE WORD LINES AND YOU WILL BE CURED.”15 The 1961 Soft Machine included one brief but telling reference to “fraud Freud and Einstein,” although this was dropped from later editions and little else would remain in his published work to indicate Burroughs’ deplorable subscription to the International Jewish-Communist conspiracy.16 Critics have preferred to turn a blind eye to it, but the anti-Semitism in his work at this time and an equally ugly misogyny were encouraged by Gysin, and represented the dark side of Burroughs’ self-declared megalomania, his missionary conviction of having discovered the secret weapon to combat a conspiracy of conspiracies. The Burroughs of unchecked paranoia was no “Friendly Prophet.”

  It was in this context that Burroughs asked “WHO SERVES THE SOFT MACHINE?” and across dozens of texts identified a hydra-headed enemy comprising women (“FIRST THEY INVADED AND TOOK OVER WOMEN OF THE WORLD”), scientists (“PREACHING DEATH AND REALITY”), newspaper magnates (“MR LUCE BEAVERBROOK HEARST TIME SMASH YOUR MACHINE”), bankers and industrialists (“ROTHSCHILD ROCKEFELLER”), and computer technology (“THE HANDLING OF MILLIONS OF LIFE SCRIPTS IN SYMBOL FORM IS DONE NOW BY ELECTRIC COMPUTERS”). Burroughs’ megalomania placed him and the Cut-Up project center-stage in a global conspiracy, and in these texts he not only addressed his enemies directly but imagined the replies they would make to “WILLY THE RAT FROM MISSOURI” who had “CALLED THE LAW” on them.

  As well as identifying language itself as the enemy—“THE SOFT MACHINE GOT IN BY THE WORD”—Burroughs specifically attacked the word and image media empire of Henry Luce. He addressed Luce and fantasized his reply (“STAND ASIDE BURROUGHS OF SPACE AND LISTEN TO THE LORD OF TIME”), while backdating the connection between Luce’s magazines and cut-up methods: “When Tzara first pulled words out of a hat the conspiracy of Life Time Fortune to monopolize Life Time and Fortune would have been smashed before it started.”17 The logic of conspiracy may seem simpleminded and run in reverse—a monopoly of news media developed because Freudians used Surrealism to stop the work of a Dadaist poet—but Burroughs was just taking the titles of Luce’s magazines at their word: they did indeed aim to copyright “Life” “Time” and “Fortune,” most literally in Luce’s championing of a permanent “American Century”—a world of American values that would run on American time, to the end of time. Fulfilling the thesis implied by chance in the very first cut-ups—when Gysin had accidentally chopped up Life magazine adverts with news items from the Herald Tribune—Burroughs’ trilogy evolved in direct opposition to Luce’s trilogy. What’s surprising is that, having identified Luce’s “Time Machine” with the “Soft Machine,” he made nothing of the connection in The Soft Machine itself, and instead made it central to Nova Express.

  Beyond naming names and identifying monopolistic professions or institutions, Burroughs was attacking the false appearance of the world we think we know, and so ultimately he defined “THIS SOFT INSECT MACHINE AS THE IMMUTABLE REALITY OF THE UNIVERSE.” He tried out a variety of metaphors to clarify his concept: from “the soft machine is a virus parasite” to “PICTURE THE SOFT MACHINE AS A PUPPET MANIPULATOR,” and evoked it in terms of the archetypal American big con game (“THE BIG STORE. THE PROP BANKS”) as well as what he called a “new Mythology for the Space Age”: “THE SOFT MACHINE? AN OBSTACLE COURSE. BASIC TRAINING FOR SPACE.”18 Essential to the emerging science fiction scenario of his Nova Conspiracy was Burroughs’ conflation of his enemies into one all-embracing anti-human invader, against whom cut-up methods could be deployed by guerrilla forces of underground resistance. By early 1961 he had written the most explicit text he would publish on the subject, which appeared in the first issue of the New Orleans magazine The Outsider in May 1961 as “Operation Soft Machine/Cut.” Laid out in newspaper-style columns—the precursor of many experiments in this format during the mid-1960s—the magazine version was never intended as part of The Soft Machine, but an earlier draft was.19 While the book is almost totally obscure about the big picture of the Nova Conspiracy and the meaning of Burroughs’ central term, the magazine text (included as an Appendix for this edition) is absolutely explicit: “The occupying power of this planet described as a soft MACHINE.”

  Equally important, the magazine piece overlaps not just the book but also Burroughs’ two manifesto pamphlets, Minutes to Go and especially The Exterminator, suggesting the larger network of publications in multiple formats of which The Soft Machine published by Olympia Press was only one element. Indeed, two parts of the book appeared in 1960 and five more in 1961 in a variety of little magazines ranging geographically from the United States (Big Table in Chicago, Metronome in New York, The Outsider in New Orleans) to England (International Literary Annual), Scotland (Sidewalk), France (Two Cities) and Belgium (Nul). Altogether, 5,000 words of The Soft Machine appeared in print before the Olympia edition in June 1961, and another 5,000 during the six months after, adding up to almost a quarter of the text. Burroughs showed his commitment to book publication throughout the decade-long cut-up project—he would not have bothered to twice revise The Soft Machine otherwise—but from the start he also recognized the unique importance of little magazines and the underground press. Olympia was in many ways the ideal publisher for him—small, foreign-based, controversial, ambiguous in its mix of high literature and bad taste, from Lolita (1955) to There’s A Whip in My Valise (also published in 1961). Nevertheless, it made more sense to cite “Mao Tse Tung on Guerrilla war tactics” and to declare “THE FOLLOWING PAGES ARE BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS,” in the crudely typed hand-printed pages of a counter-cultural magazine like The Outsider.

  “THE WORD-STRIP”

  The 1961 Soft Machine mixes elliptical episodes of science fiction fantasy with ethnographic travelogue, repetitious sex scenes, pulp genre parodies, and a variety of unclassifiable and uncompromising language experiments. The text is so relentlessly bizarre that it seems simultaneously impossible to read and yet—­unlike the second and third editions, where the reader is left confused by non-narrative sections—not in the least frustrating. Instead of a narrative scenario, it is dominated by long image-lists (redolent of, and sometimes cutting up, the prose poems of Rimbaud and St.-John Perse) that depict toxic landscapes—swamps, jungles, canals, rotting cities of concrete pillars and bamboo bridges—and whirling machinery—penny arcades, Ferris wheels, pinball machines, cable cars, elevators. Ginsberg described it as “page after page of heroic sinister prose poetry.”20 Although the polluted wastelands clearly develop out of Naked Lunch, the dominance of South American locations and the recurrent use of Spanish signals Burroughs’ vision of a new global colonialism, the planet’s occupation by an alien empire: Trak ­Utilities—the dominant corporation in The Soft Machine, precursor of the Nova Mob in Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded—extends the imperial ambitions of sixteenth-century Conquistadors from the New World to the whole of reality. (“You can’t walk out on Trak,” Burroughs would clarify for the revised text; “There’s just no place to go.”)

  It therefore comes as less of a surprise to discover that in spring 1961 Burroughs planned to incorporate into The Soft Machine another type of stylistically anomalous material; his 1953 epistolary report on
Central and South America, “In Search of Yage.” According to Paul Bowles, it was only because “Girodias was hurrying him towards the end” that about thirty pages of this material did not go into the book.21 Burroughs made up for it by creating overlaps between his revised edition of The Soft Machine and “In Search of Yage,” building into The Yage Letters a cut-up text (“I Am Dying, Meester?”) much of which he incorporated into the new Soft Machine. The connection Burroughs made across books was as much formal as geographic or thematic, associating the hallucinogenic yagé vine with cut-up techniques as twin methods of sensual derangement, linguistic transcendence, and visionary transport to other worlds. Archival typescripts confirm the association: Burroughs made an extensive cut-up of his 1953 “Composite City” vision, whose yagé-inspired montage poetics anticipated The Soft Machine by pointing to the organic fertility of words in recombination.22 The environmentalist politics implied by Burroughs’ use of South American topographies therefore coincides with an intriguing textual ecology. Rather than being made to express meaning, phrases spontaneously replicate, duplicate, permutate, animate. Burroughs had long wanted to “create something that will have a life of its own”—an ambition he opposed to writing a “novel,” which is “something finished, that is, dead”—and in The Soft Machine his mechanical methods do create a strange, stuttering version of autonomous life.23 What is most inspiring about the 1961 edition is therefore not its intermittent flashes of open insurrection but its use of language. For political ferocity it has nothing on Nova Express, and it lacks the pragmatic polemics of The Ticket That Exploded, but where else can we encounter the imperative “Walk scorpion hair. Room violets,” or “shredded clouds impregnated with flesh fur of steel”?

  In narrative terms, the 1961 text is virtually static, and at a sentence level it is paralyzed by the lack of active verbs. In other volumes of the Cut-Up Trilogy, Burroughs gave his fragmented writing forward momentum by using the em dash (—) and ellipsis ( . . .); here the dominant punctuation mark is the staccato period stop.24 Combined with The Constant Capitalization Of Words, the result is unreadable as a narrative. Instead, individual phrases possess an inspiring alien energy, the dynamic vitality of composites made from wildly incompatible terms: “Brass entrails from other twilights. Fur youths in glass hunger down the bones. Spit blood crystals of dawn. Masturbating broken mirror rocks.” It’s “unreadable” in the sense of being impossible to read without being forced to wonder what “reading” is at all. The effect is viscerally and philosophically bracing, for a while. The other volumes in the Cut-Up Trilogy also suffered a law of diminishing returns, but, unlike the first Soft Machine, they took advantage of their length to generate recurrent effects of déjà-vu, creating an uncanny dimension of disturbed memory missing from the 1961 text.